| I guess a good place to begin is my high school graduation. I graduated in 1984 from Calumet High School in Calumet, Mi. Who would have ever guessed at that time I was going to be a father. Well here she is now Justine at age 11. Then in another year I had a boy named Jake who is now 10. Here are the kids dressed up. |
| Having kids made me realize I had to get serious about what I would be doing to support them and my ex-wife. So I decided to pursue an education. MTU was a good choice since it was close to home and had a good reputation. In 1987 I received two associate degrees one in Electrical Engineering Technology and the other in Electromechanical Engineering Technology. After graduating from MTU and finding the job offers received with an associate degree was not really what I wanted, I decided to pursue a degree in Electrical Engineering with the Communications option. I received my bachelors degree in May of 1991. |
| The job search began after college. It took me three months to finally hear something positive. I received a call on a Friday night at about 8pm when I was getting ready to go out. It was from a company in California. After my old boss (Walt Lema) talked with me a couple of times he offered me a job. In Oct of '91 I moved out to Fairfield, CA where I started working for Mar, Inc. It was a scary thought moving and starting a new career. I mean I worked as a carpenter for 8yrs with Palosaari Const., Inc before becoming an Engineer. |
| At Mar, Inc, the C3 division designed, maintained and installed communication systems for the government. All of our contracts came through the Navy's Environmental Community (you know the weather guessers). This is where I had got the opportunity to start setting up computer interfaces and computer networks. I learned most things out in the field by reading books and manuals. I also learned a lot from my friend Don Troshynski. Here is a picture of Don, Scott Ruoff (also old work buddy) and Me from right to left. |
| Working with DDI was similar to the work I did with MAR. I started getting deeper into computer networking with DDI since the Navy's Environmental Community was finally starting to move to computer networking. With DDI, I set up a number of routers, wrote network test procedures, set up dial up Communication Servers, the list goes on but I don't want to bore anyone. |
| MTU was kind of a change of gear for me, since I did not ever do much of setting up of computers before this. As you can see from above my experience was with setting up of the hardware which interfaced computers. My computer networking knowledge of course helped me in putting pc's on the network. Well anyway at MTU I am getting the opportunity to set up a number of OS's (Dos, Win3x, Windows NT, Windows95) and network and administer them. In the future I will also be learning more about MAC and Unix. There is still a lot to learn and I am looking forward to it. |